Catch Up Part 2: We’re Going Down

 In preparation for moving Cinder home this week (holy shit still not ready to wrap my head around that) I bumped up to two lessons a week on her instead of one. Last week I had a flat lesson on Tuesday and then a jump lesson on Wednesday.

Cooling off with a walk down the road

Our flat lesson was pretty good. I’m able to get her consistently put together at the trot, but the canter is still a work in progress. We did attempt our first walk-canter transitions and they were surprisingly decent, considering upward canter transitions aren’t our strong suit. 

For jump lesson, we did a quick warm up then Trainer A had us start by trotting into a line. We jumped the first fence fine, kinda fell apart in the line and trotted the out fence. It felt good, I stayed with her and kept my leg on, but Cinder tripped on the landing. And she kept tripping for about 30-40 feet. A said it looked like a cartoon where their legs are spinning circles but they’re going nowhere. She finally went down to her knees and rolled onto her right side. 

My poor, poor saddle

I got tossed clear of her, landing on my right boob (possibly hitting it on something?) and my right knee. I looked over and saw Cinder down on her side. She stayed down for a few seconds before deciding that rolling would be a good idea. I tried to crawl out of the way while yelling at her to get up but thankfully A made it over to us and was able to get Cinder up before she rolled on my saddle. 

A handed Cinder off to one of the barn kids while she went to grab some ice boots. Cinder had scraped up both of her knees and I was still down in the dirt with my banged up knee. Both of us got about 5 minutes in the ice boots before I felt ok to get up. I gingerly walked around before pronouncing I was ok to get back in the saddle. Once I got on it was clear my knee was not happy when I put my foot in the stirrup so I ended up dropping them. We walked around for another 10minutes or so before I gently slid off of her. Cinder, thankfully, didn't seem too upset by the ordeal. 

A rode Cinder on Thursday and said she was little anxious approaching the first jump, but once she made it over she was fine. Cin has a little scrape on one knee, but otherwise just missing patches of hair. I had given her a gram of bute Wednesday night, but A said she felt and looked perfectly sound Thursday. I, on the other hand, was taking the maximum dosage of ibuprofen and took Thursday off of work, alternating keeping my knee up with ice on it, and walking around to loosen up some of the stiffness. I also have one hell of bruise on my boob. I'm feeling much more normal now, just some stiffness when I first get up in the morning, but we'll see how I feel once I get back in the saddle later today.